1) Seth Macfarlane
I hate hate hate hate Family Guy. I hate it absolutely. I hate it more than Oscar Pistorius hates the title of the movie Dead Man Walking.
I literally can’t stand watching it, and I can’t imagine its creator is any better. Family Guy makes my teeth grate and my fists curl up into balls every time I see it, which is occasionally, because I live in a fraternity house. If someone were to give me two movie reels, place me next to a fire, and explain to me that these were the last two copies of every season of Family Guy and The Simpsons on earth; I can burn or keep both, but not one, I honestly might discard Homer just to get rid of Peter and Lois. Yes, that much.
The worst part about this is that Family Guy’s overall stupidity has penetrated every comedy on television. The League is a good show, but sometimes the characters will switch from douchey and irreverant to unpalatable and psycopathic. Do you know who gave that show the freedom to do that? That asshole Seth Macfarlane. He gave comedy the liberty to be offensive randomly and without context. ABORTION. GENOCIDE. See? Not funny.
(Note: I just saw on Facebook that Macfarlane is bombing. Good. Fuck that guy.)
2) They’re Going To Screw Over Django Unchained and Flight
Oscars go to the epic and the artsy, but not your run-of-the-mill polished Hollywood movie. If you look at the list of best pictures over the past 20 years, you’ll see that this is verifiably true, and I have a feeling was right that the same will did happen this year. Hollywood has spent years sculpting and perfecting the emotionally disconnected but well-meaning dad, but the Oscars won’t reward his depiction. When a studio goes ahead and does a great version (read: The Descendents), it loses to an oh-so-lovely French movie about an artist, filmed in black and white purely to annoy its viewers. (So highbrow!)
In fact, the more polished a movie is, the less likely it is to be nominated. Men In Black was nominated for no serious awards. The year it came out, 9.5 hour romance The Titanic beat the in-retrospect-kind-of-dumb Good Will Hunting (“You’re a genius, Will. You’ve read every book on earth…twice. But what do you really know…about life?”) for best picture. I’ve seen Men In Black roughly one thousand times, I can place every line in that movie, and fifteen years later Will Smith still makes that suit look damn good. Can you honestly say it wasn’t the best picture that year?
The nominees this year for Most Likely To Be Stepped Over By A Really Boring Film are Django Unchained and Flight. Flight has Hollywood clichés, to be sure – an unnecessary romance coupled with a really unnecessary angry black son. It’s also an original and thrilling depiction of a man hiding his alcoholism. It practically made me want to quit drinking. And, unlike Denzel, I drink only on weekends, and rarely pilot passenger airplanes when I do.
Django Unchained is self-consciously as Hollywood as it can possibly be, reveling in snappy dialogue, adventure, romance, and stylized shoot-em-up sequences. The brilliance is that it mixes classic Hollywood with brutal depictions of slavery, making you want to watch a set of circumstances that you normally would learn about only out of a solemn sense of citizen’s guilt. In my mind, it’s the year’s best movie. But it’s also as if, by tackling a serious topic with Hollywood tropes, Quentin Tarantino was saying “fuck you” to everyone who says that Hollywood’s box of tricks is less-than when it comes to filmmaking.
Which, in a sense, means he was saying “fuck you” to the Oscars.
I’m just glad to share something with that man!
It should have won Best Picture! – Evan
Django won 2 oscars…